28 June 2011 1:24 PM

If you imagine World Cup training camps are entirely sombre affairs, with rival players competing viciously in a highly pressured environment under the watchful gaze of the England coaches, without any time for fun and frolics or any opportunity to let off steam, you are entirely mistaken.

The 45 selected England players at Pennyhill Park have this week been wrestling for a seat on that plane – and, by the look of these pictures, had a jolly good time doing so.

Matt Banahan floors Delon Armitage and then grapples him with his giant-sized, multi-coloured grip, Dylan Hartley bares his teeth while attempting to evade Tom Croft, Jonny Wilkinson lets slip a smile and James Haskell takes on the big man Banahan in a clash of the titans.

Let’s just hope they’re grappling for the William Webb Ellis trophy come the end of October, eh?

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21 June 2011 12:03 PM

Last month Thames Water proudly and smugly announced they had joined the growing list of companies diving headfirst into the pristine pool (not local leisure centre) of the Olympic corporate bandwagon. The Olympic corporate bandwagon that incidentally comes with lots of nice seats, traffic-free lanes and all the free-range prawn ciabattas you can fit into your mouth.

Oh and that other word the Olympics so love … legacy.

The IOC use the word ‘legacy’ as international currency – a passport to a clean conscience. It makes the Olympic body appear more like an NGO than a money-making operation, and anyone affiliated can happily (and publicly) tick their ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ box and keep the profits coming.

So let’s focus on Thames Water. Why have a water company earned the wrath of a sports journalist? Because they are attempting to turn the playing fields on which I learnt to play rugby into a gigantic new sewer; the main construction base for a 21-mile poo pipe. Think postal sorting office but swap letters and parcels for human excrement.

Personally this is where I played sport as a kid; touch rugby with my dad, junior rugby with a local club, cricket, football and frisbee with friends. Far more importantly, right now 30 schools from 10 different London boroughs – as well as an amazing 44 separate sports clubs – use the fields for training or organised matches at least once a week.

And that’s just one impact. The tidal wave of joggers and cyclists who use the towpath (a recent council estimate puts that tidal wave at about 10,000 people per weekend), the armada of rowers and sailors on the river, the boathouse and Scouts hut that will have to be ripped down and rebuilt elsewhere (if they can afford it … which they probably can’t) and the impact – both ecological and economical – of seven years of dirty, heavy-duty construction on what is currently peaceful acres of green grass, fauna and trees. Something to think about, perhaps?

This isn’t to suggest that Thames Water, whose water so many millions of people rely on every day, can just ignore the need to build this monster of a pipe, but they can certainly afford to shift the project elsewhere. The company themselves have already come up with a number of alternative sites where the construction would be infinitely less intrusive and devastating to the local environment and sports-mad community.

Legacy? The International Olympics Committee, the British Olympics Association and the Thames Water CEOs should not be allowed to utter the word if this project is considered as anything more than a smelly abomination. It is as incongruous as holding a dubstep music festival in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. There should not even be a debate.